by Gary K. Wolf
“Oh, dearie, you look so lovely,” said Roger, taking his wife’s hand. “I don’t know if Roger ever spoke of me or not. I’m his beloved Aunt Rhonda. I know he mentioned you to me quite often. He loved you very, very much, and always knew that you did not leave him of your own free will, but rather were forced into it by that ne’er-do-well Rocco De-Greasy.”
“We don’t want to overexcite ourselves, do we, Auntie?” I said, pushing the rabbit down the path toward my car. “I think you’d better go back to your hotel and take a nap.”
“Oh, my, that’s so considerate of you,” said Roger, more to Jessica than to me, “but I feel I can be of better use providing spiritual comfort to my charming and beautiful niece-in-law.”
I grabbed him by the elbow and lock-stepped him out to the road. “I really think you need the rest, Auntie.” I tossed him into my car and didn’t take my eyes off him until the car disappeared from view.
“A strange woman,” said Jessica when I rejoined her. “Amazing resemblance to her nephew. They could almost pass for twins.”
“No,” I said, “the old lady’s got longer ears.”
Jessica slipped her arm through mine. She had a flower in her hand, which she’d taken from one of Roger’s wreaths. “What did you think of the funeral?”
I shrugged. “Funerals, weddings, they’re all the same to me. The only difference is whether you walk or ride down the aisle. Either way you wind up six feet deep in misery.” We reached her car, one of those sporty two-seaters with a name like something off an Italian menu. “How about you and me, we go for a ride?” I said. “Someplace quiet where we can talk.”
“What about?”
“Fairy-tale stuff. Sailing ships and sealing wax. Cabbages and kings.”
She unlocked her side of the car, climbed in, and started the engine. “You came to the wrong person. Catch a ride home with Tweedle-De-Dum.”
“How about teakettles, then? That more your kind of fable?”
She opened the passenger door. “I do believe you’re going my way.” She pointed toward the glovebox. “There’s a bottle inside.”
I swigged down enough courage to climb aboard the sailing ship on her bottle’s label and head out after the nearest white whale. “Call me Ishmael,” I said.
“I beg your pardon,” said Jessica.
“I said, I’ve got the teakettle.”
She immediately killed her engine. “Where is it?” she said with a voice so silky it could magnetize a rubber wand. “And when can I get it?”
“After we work our deal,” I said. “As I remember it, you promised me a pretty rich reward.”
“Of course.” She reached for the ignition. “My place, or yours?”
“Neither. I want something else, instead.”
“What?” From the puzzled way she said it, I could tell she couldn’t conceive of anything more valuable than the treasure she had just offered me.
“Some information. For starters, suppose you tell me about Little Rock DeGreasy’s scheme to sell forged copies of the works he and Carol Masters stole from Rocco’s art gallery.”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“Not directly, no. But you knew about it, didn’t you? Little Rock told you about it.”
My guess panned out. “Yes, he told me about it. The boy loves me. He saw his scheme as a means of earning enough money so we could run away together. But just because I knew about it doesn’t make me guilty of a crime.”
“I think different. I could bring you up for concealing evidence, bur I’m inclined to hold out for something bigger.”
She picked her wreath flower off the console between us. One by one she plucked out its petals. When she got to the last one, it turned out she loved somebody not. “Such as?”
“How about murder one?”
She laughed. “You’ll have a fine time proving that one.”
“I don’t think so. You tie in too well. Somebody told Sid Sleaze that the law was getting ready to close down Carol and Little Rock’s forgery racket. I think that somebody was you. You told Sleaze, knowing full well he’d squeeze one last dollar out of the scam by going to Rocco with the full story. You knew how Rocco would react when he heard it. He would call Carol Masters and Little Rock onto the carpet. You counted on one or the other of them getting panicky enough to do Rocco in.”
“Why would I possibly want them to do that? I loved Rocco.”
“I think you loved his money more, and I think it’s going to be you who gets most of it when they read his will. That’s motive enough in my book.”
She brushed her single-petaled flower first across her lips and then across mine. “What if I did construct a situation designed to goad either Carol or Little Rock into killing Rocco? Dear Roger beat them both to it, and I had nothing to do with that.”
“I’m not so sure.” I leaned back against her fine leather seat, really enjoying myself for the first time since this whole miserable affair began. “When Sleaze came over to tell Rocco about the forgery scheme, he also brought duplicate negatives of your infamous comic book. I’d guess Rocco didn’t take kindly to the revelation that his sweetheart was a tart. He called you on the carpet, too. Threatened to kick you out of his will. Maybe even out of his house. So you asked Roger to come over. Before he got there, you killed Rocco yourself. You gave Roger the gun. Begged him to hide it for you at his place. The rabbit was just nuts enough about you to do it. You then followed him home and shot him, too. Bingo. Instant solution to all your problems. You inherit, and Roger, who isn’t around to defend himself, takes the fall.”
“Great imagination,” she said. “You should write for the strips.”
“Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll do an Arabian adventure series about a magic lantern. I understand that’s one of your specialties, magic lanterns. Wouldn’t have anything to do with the teakettle, would it?”
Her mouth and her eyes formed three perfect circles within the soft oval of her face. “The teakettle? Certainly not. Are you insinuating it’s a magic lantern? That’s ridiculous. There are no such things. They’re myths. I study about them in my mythology class. Get the connection? A mythology class. Because they’re myths. No, the teakettle is valuable because of its composition.”
“Gold and jewels, I know. The Templar Knights.”
“Correct. The Templar Knights. Now, when can I have it?” she asked with altogether too much pleading in her voice.
Even though it was a good half-mile walk to the nearest bus stop, I decided I’d rather hoof it than spend another minute in that car with that woman. I got out and slammed the door.
“When can I have the teakettle?” she repeated as I walked through the gravestones and away.
“How about just before the next reunion of the Veterans of Foreign Crusades?” I called back.
Her reply probably set a few of the stiffs below me spinning around in their graves. They suffered it in silence though, and so did I.
Chapter: •34•
When I swung by my office to check the mail, I found my office door lock sprung, and by a pro. I flipped a two-bit piece. Heads, I did my patented rolling-entry routine. Tails, I took it on the lam. The coin hit the floor, rolled under the door and into my office.
I was down on my hands and knees, peering under the crack to see how the coin had landed when the door swung open and I found myself at eye level with Rusty Hudson’s argyle socks. With the tip of a spit-shined brown cordovan he scooted my quarter under my nose. “It came up heads,” he said. “Does that mean you go or stay?”
I pocketed my coin and stood up. “You know, when you come calling and nobody’s home, it’s customary to wait outside.”
“You wouldn’t want me waiting out there in that drafty hallway, would you?” He slammed the door shut behind us. “I might’ve caught a cold.” He ambled through the waiting room into my office. “You fumigate this furniture yourself,” he asked, “or did Goodwill throw it in as a free extra when you bought the stuff?�
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He wasn’t a particularly big man, but he had a presence that filled the room and seemed to squeeze me toward the wall as I walked past him to my chair. “You want something specific, or did you just drop by to cheer me up with your sparkling repartee?”
He sat down on the edge of my desk. It reacted to Hudson about the same way I did. It shuddered under his weight but held steady. “You been poking around the Rocco DeGreasy case the past few days,” Hudson said, in the same tone he would use to accuse me of a hatchet murder, “and I want you to knock it off. Everything was nice and closed up tidy. Then you came along and started sniffing around, and all of a sudden the word comes down from the top that maybe the case ought to be opened up again. You know, Valiant, I got me a perfect record. I never been wrong on a case yet, not once in twenty years on the force, and I don’t mean to break that record now. The DeGreasy case is closed, get it, closed. You know what’s good for you, you’ll accept that as gospel. I can yank your license in a minute, Valiant, and a lot of big boys downtown would consider it good-bye to bad rubbish. You want to stay in business and keep on everybody’s good side, you do what I tell you. Understood?”
I nodded.
He gave me a playful poke that nearly broke my jaw, and left me to decide my own fate.
I pulled out my trusty quarter and flipped it. It hit the floor, rolled on edge, and disappeared from sight, this time into a baseboard mousehole. I peeked in after it and saw a ‘toon rodent in yellow shoes and red Bermudas rubbing a swollen lump on his head where my quarter had clobbered him.
I was just about to ask the mouse if the coin had landed heads or tails when he turned, saw me looking in at him, and bopped me on the nose with a word balloon as foul as anything you read in the flames at a bluenose’s book-burning.
I sat down at my desk and poured myself a snootful of liquid wisdom. It told me to pack it in and head south until the problem vanished along with Roger. But, like I said, nobody ever accused me of having an overabundance of good sense. I had an obligation, and I wasn’t about to quit until I fulfilled it.
I stopped by the Persian deli to see if Abou Ben’s uncle had been able to decipher the inscription off the bottom of the teakettle.
While Uncle trundled out from the back room, Abou Ben treated me to a plate of something that looked like it had been kicked up off a dirt road by a highballing truck, and a glass of whatever Bedouins used to fuel their hurricance lamps.
Uncle handed me his scribblings.
When I translated what he had translated, it read, “May your dreams come true.”
I asked Abou Ben what this meant.
He said it was customary to inscribe such things on Persian teakettles. He showed me several similar teakettles he had for sale in his deli, all inscribed on the bottom with a short platitude about peace, good luck, or prosperity. He did not know when the custom of inscribing teakettles began, but he remembered it from when he was a boy, and so did his ancient uncle.
Abou Ben invited me to stick around for an impromptu floor show featuring his eligible sister, the belly dancer, but when I saw the size of her belly, I beat a hasty retreat.
I found Dominick DeGreasy in his office, trying to figure out how to work a paper clip. “Here’s the story,” I told him. “I’ve got a line on your teakettle, but I need to make sure it’s the right one. Do you have anything that shows it? A drawing maybe, or a photo?”
He threw the paper clip into a pile with a pair of scissors, a letter opener, and other assorted high-performance office implements too complex for him to handle. “Yeah, yeah, I got something. I got something right here.”
DeGreasy opened his desk and produced the artwork for a Baby Herman comic strip. The strip had been shot on location in Roger’s bungalow. The third panel showed Roger in his kitchen. On the stove behind him sat the teakettle. “That’s it,” said Dominick. “That’s my grandmother’s teakettle.”
I took the strip from him. “Okay to keep this?” I asked.
He nodded.
“I’ll be back to you shortly,” I said, “with your brother’s killer in one hand, and your teakettle in the other.”
Three burly guys carted boxes and crates from out of Carol Masters’s studio to a moving van parked on the curb.
I found Carol packing the last of some lights into a cardboard carton.
“Leaving town, I see.” I held the top of the carton down while she did a sloppy job of taping it shut. “How about if, for a going away present, I give you a half-hour headstart before I tell the cops about your shady shenanigan?”
“Go ahead, be smart,” she said haughtily. “I still believe what I said about you. You never cared a bit for that rabbit. If you hadn’t lucked into this forgery angle, you would have taken your money and run with it long ago.”
“That’s one woman’s opinion. Now let me read you my version of reality. You got something a lot worse than art forgery to cover up. You’re knee deep in murder. Rocco called you the night he died. He threatened to turn you in. You got scared. You hot-footed it over to his place, shot him, framed the rabbit for it, and shot Roger, too.”
For once I caught her speechless, and to tell you the truth I liked the change. “That’s absurd,” she said when she found her voice again.
“Sure it is, but if I yell it loud enough and long enough, I could get a lot of folks to believe it.”
“You must play a swell game of hardball,” she said.
“Not really. When I pitch I’m too inclined to throw for the head.” I showed her the strip I’d gotten from Dominick. “Rocco once refused to approve a strip you photographed. Was this it?”
She took it in her hands and examined it. “Yes, that’s it. He said it was below syndicate standards, although he never explained exactly what he meant by that. He’d never quibbled with anything else I ever shot for him.”
I took it back. “What do you know about the DeGreasy brothers’ background? Where did they get their start in the business?”
The moving men wheeled out the last of her belongings. She gave her studio one last going over. She’d left behind a few pushpins stuck in the wall. She took them out and put them into her purse. A very thorough lady. When the bloodhounds came tracking, they’d sniff no trace of her here. I walked her down to the street.
“I heard the DeGreasys came from somewhere back East,” she told me, “but they never talked about it. I always got the feeling they were embarrassed by their background. I assumed they had grown up poor. I don’t know how they got into cartoons.”
“Ever meet any members of their family?”
“Uttle Rock.”
“I mean besides him.”
“No, never.”
“Was Little Rock’s mother a human?”
Her condescending tone told me how naive she considered the question. “Of course she was a human. Rocco was a human. What else could his child’s mother be? Humans and ‘toons can’t mate. Everyone knows that.”
“You have any idea why Jessica Rabbit might be interested in mythology?”
“The less I know about Jessica Rabbit, the happier I am.” She climbed into the back of the van with her stuff.
“You got a forwarding address?” I asked her.
“General delivery,” she yelled back as the van rolled away.
“What town?” I asked.
“You’re such a hot detective,” she said. “You figure it out.”
I had a guy in the police department who owed me a favor. I called and asked him to get me a history on the DeGreasy brothers, particularly through their early years.
He promised to run it through.
Chapter: •35•
Jessica’s City College mythology prof, a ‘toon named Cack-leberry, was the spitting image of Humpty Dumpty. “What can I do for you, Mister Valiant?” he asked. The single overhead light in his tiny office made his shell-white noggin glow.
“I’d like some information about a student of yours. Jessica Rabbit.”
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nbsp; Since he didn’t have a neck, he nodded from the groin, rapping his chest against his desk in the process. I thought I might wind up with one professor, scrambled loose, but he must have been made of sterner stuff than your normal hen fruit, since he survived the impact without a hairline crack. “Ah, yes, Jessica Rabbit. A beautiful and charming woman. She’s a model, you know. Does auto and toothpaste commercials. The only real celebrity I’ve ever had in my class.”
“What can you tell me about her?”
“Not much, I’m afraid.” He twisted his body side to side, rapping hard against both arms of his wooden chair. The way he knocked himself around, I hoped his group medical plan covered reassembly—and by something better than all the king’s men. “She’s a bright student. Straight A’s. Especially interested in magic lanterns. I gave her a most comprehensive reading list on the subject.”
“She tell you why she’s so interested in them?”
“She mentioned something about writing a book.” Cackle-berry stirred some sugar into a cup of instant coffee, removed the spoon, and idly tapped it against his forehead. I stood back to avoid the splatter, but he came through in one piece again.
“What exactly is a magic lantern?” I asked.
“In simplest terms, it’s any lantern possessing a genie,” answered Cacklebeny. “The most common legend concerns a lantern in which a ‘toon wizard imprisoned his mortal enemy. The wizard cast a spell over this enemy, forcing him to grant three wishes to anyone reciting the proper magic words.”
“Could these wishes be for anything?”
The professor nestled into his chair, the way he would have if a hen had suddenly sat down on top of him. “Within certain limitations. While the genie could make you rich, it could not grant you all the money in the world.”
“What about causing somebody to love you? Could the genie do that?”
“Most assuredly.” The professor put his hands behind his head. His shirt pulled open, and I saw a swatch of color on his chest which could have been either a tattoo or some dye left over from Easter.
“This lantern sounds like a nice trinket to have around.”
